OOC: Have some infopost! Have some more!
FRIENDING LIST WENT UP SO I'M GONNA START THE BANDWAGON.
Omg you guys I have ~two~ newbies now. TWO. I am beside myself.
Let's get the oldies out of the way, bulletpoint-style.
(Also, I'm not apologizing for the amount of gifs in this post, but you should be warned.)
Rory Skywalker, née Gilmore - Alumna//auroryborealis
"I promise, the only way you could be more important to me is if you had a Kit Kat bar growing out of your head."
Sookie Stackhouse - Alumna//justwantsquiet
“Some might think you suicidal."
"Well, 'some' can stick it up their ass.”
Daenerys Targaryen - Expat//unburnt_queen
“'Woman?' She chuckled. 'Is that meant to insult me? I would return the slap, if I took you for a man.'”
Olive Penderghast - Student//dirtiest_skank
"You're being pretty cavalier about this. Aren't you supposed to be eternally in love with him and shit?"
"Yes...I believe so, if I was the Gossip Girl in Sweet Valley of the Traveling Pants."
Laurie Keller - Townie//ohjellybean
"It's so romantic. Like that movie Inception, when Leo loves his wife so much, but then she gets mad and moves to that weird city where there is like no people and earthquakes all the time. Then he ends up on Snow Mountain and falls in love with Juno."
"Oh, Jellybean...you didn't understand that movie at all, did you?"
"No, but I cried so hard at the end."
OKAY WHOO NOW WE'RE ON THE TWO NEWBIES.
If you don't read anything else in this post, please do check out Po's info, as I have another telepath -- kinda.
Prince Po of Lienid - Student//rings_of_grace
“I'll teach you how to defend yourself, how to maim a man. We can use Po as a model.'
'Wonderful,' Po said. 'It's quite boring really, the way you beat me to death with your hands and feet, Katsa. It'll be refreshing to have you come at me with a knife.”
I'm just going to crib most of this from my app, as it's easier.
About Graceling and Kristin Cashore's Seven Kingdoms, which are different from George R. R. Martin's Seven Kingdoms and dude why can't we just have like Eight Kingdoms or Fourteen Kingdoms or something different just once?
Graceling is a young adult series by Kristin Cashore -- that's the title of the first book, and there's then Bitterblue, the sequel, and Fire, a companion. The trilogy is set in the Seven Kingdoms of Nander, Sunder, Monsea, Estill, Wester, Middluns and the island of Lienid. The series is overall mostly realistic fantasy -- lots of kings and queens and lords and ladies and big skirts and arranged marriages, but there's one magical element: Graces.
Graces, for lack of a better word, are basically magic powers. They're roughly as common as, say, the X-gene in Marvel, and a Graced person is marked by having differently-colored eyes -- plus, you know, magic powers. A Grace is a very specific gift -- you might be Graced with cooking, so you make the best bread ever. Or you might be Graced with the ability to find anything, or Graced with archery, or Graced with the ability to predict or control the weather. Gracelings are generally either outcast and mistrusted if they're not useful to the king or queen, or else put right to work as soon as their Grace manifests.
Are we following okay? Sweet.
So, our narrator and heroine, Katsa, is a Graceling from the kingdom of Middluns. (Yes, it's in the middle. Cashore's not great with the naming.) She's a relative of the sadistic, cowardly King Randa, and unfortunately, because of her Grace, she's basically his prisoner. Because you see, the Lady Katsa is Graced with the ability to kill, and as much as she hates it, she's become Randa's assassin. Quietly, though, Katsa's started a rebellion underground, and one night she and a small team go to rescue the Lienid Prince Tealiff, who is being held against his will in a dungeon in Sunder. She encounters a Graced hand-fighter, whose name she eventually learns is Po, and who she leaves alive but unconscious so she can take the aging Tealiff away to Randa's castle to recover.
Katsa runs off on another mission, but when she returns, she finds that the Lienid Prince Po has come to look for his grandfather, and through a series of interesting events that I'll leave vague because of spoilers, she and Po end up on an adventure to restore some semblance of order to the corrupt Seven Kingdoms and rescue Po's cousin, the Princess Bitterblue (which is the SECOND worst name in this series), from the thrall of her father King Leck of Monsea.
And...then there's more book after that, but spoilers, and two other books in the series -- Fire is a sort-of prequel, and Bitterblue covers what happens eight years after the first book. I highly recommend them, and not just because I want an island full of Gracelings with weird Graces. (There's people who are Graced with cooking and who ALWAYS KNOW WHAT WOULD SATISFY YOU MOST. WHY IS THIS NOT MY LIFE?)
Prince Po, who has a lot of Sueish characteristics and I'm sorry for that.
Po, whose name is actually Prince Greening Grandemalion but who the hell is going to call ANYONE THAT EVER, is the seventh son of King Ror of Lienid. He's a Graceling (we'll get to his Grace in the powers section), with one gold eye and one silver eye -- his nickname actually comes from a type of tree with that coloration that grows in this world.
Po is very playful, good-natured, and deceptively carefree. In actuality, he's a very shrewd kind of guy under that facade, but not in a creepy Peter Wiggin kind of way -- he just really notices people and things. And because of that, Po's one of those people who can make friends with a tree stump, because he really wants to get to know you. He's remarkably perceptive (another aspect of his Grace), and very quick-witted -- boy can think fast on his feet. He is also kind of a massive flirt, though maybe less so by Fandom standards. (But by pseudo-medieval standards, he's sort of like sex in lace-up breeches.)
Of course, he's not awesome all the time, every day. Po has a temper, and can be very, very stubborn. He's been known to throw wee tantrums and wander off to sulk, and he'll stick to a point until everyone's basically forgotten what it was about before giving in. But for the most part, he's very good-natured, and is all about everyone getting along. He's also a fairly good strategist, and an excellent hand-fighter.
Physically speaking, Po's tawny in complexion and dark-haired -- Lienid is sort of like the Calormen of this world, in the "it's sort of vaguely ethnic/Middle Eastern/South Asian?" way. He wears ten gold rings on his hands -- one for each member of his family, as well as one distinctive ring that marks him as a Prince of Lienid. He also wears a gold hoop in either ear, and we already talked about his effed up Mary Sue eyes. (I love this series, you guys, but GOD I HATE THE STUPID EYE THING.) It's unlikely anyone'll really see these, at least at first, but he also has a series of intricate tattoos spanning his upper arms -- they're intended to only be seen by the woman he'll marry.
Powers and TRICKERY omg.
Here there be the only spoilers I'm gonna bust out in this thing, because it's actually important that people know this. IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, OMG, READ THIS.
Po is a Graceling, and for about half of the first book, Katsa and the reader are led to believe that his Grace is hand-fighting. He's the only person who can even somewhat match Katsa's abilities, and it's not a secret at all -- all the court in Lienid knows of Prince Po's skills, and in fact word spread even throughout the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. It's been known pretty much since his Grace manifested when he was a small child.
Only, the thing is? Po's not Graced with fighting. He'll be telling people in Fandom that he is, because that's the party line. Remember when I said that kings/queens can basically take Gracelings for their own once they've shown they can be useful, and otherwise, they're an outcast/untrusted people? Well, most of that stems from the more dangerous Graces -- Katsa's ability to kill, or being Graced with compulsion or the ability to change people's minds are the kinds of things that make people wary of Gracelings in the first place.
Po's Grace, actually, is mind-reading, and a super-human understanding of the world around him. At sixteen, it's not fully developed, but by the end of the first novel, Po is able to basically use a sort of psychic echolocation to determine his whereabouts at any given moment, with his eyes closed. He's aware of the shape of everything in the physical world, down to leaves and how they move, and can even find things without ever having seen them because he can sense where they are. How that translates to Fandom is that Po has extraordinarily good reflexes, is a phenomenal fighter (his mom started that story when he was younger to protect him), and is extremely graceful. (Ha.)
Now, on the mind-reading, because it's special too -- Po can only read a character's mind if they are thinking about him specifically. So, when someone is intending to punch him in the face, he can block it because he knows it's coming. Or, as is often more common in Fandom, if someone is thinking, "What an amazingly hot dude, I want to lick that," he'll probably go talk to them with a smile.
As far as gameplay, I will absolutely not mod anything without a player's express permission that I can have him pick up their thoughts. There's always a workaround -- in canon, Graces can kind of cancel each other out and often do. (Po, for instance, is immune to someone Graced with compulsion because he knows their intent. I would imagine he'd also cancel out with another telepathic type.) So I have a signup thread below! Please tell me if Po can't read your character's thoughts, or if you'd rather he didn't, and please also tell me if you want to give me blanket permission to have him do so. If you don't ping into either, I'll probably bother you if our characters ever interact, just to check on that. :)
The important stuff, if you skipped the tl;dr
Name: Prince Greening Grandemalion, but he's actually called Po after a tree, which is the same color as his eyes.
Age, class: 16, junior.
From: Graceling, which you should all read like, yesterday.
Played by: Luke Pasqualino. Sorry, Effy and Lucrezia.
Appearance: Probably right around 6', lanky and muscular, with shaggy dark hair and one silver eye and one gold one. (I'm sorry.) Dresses sort of like medieval Ottoman royalty. Wears a bunch of rings. Has tattoos you won't see unless he really likes you.
Powers: Has a super-human perception of the physical world; can read your mind if you are thinking about him, but can't otherwise. Sign up below to opt out, or opt in blanket-permission-style.
Pie: Apple is best, haters.
This one is easier, omg.
Jane Bennet - Townie//looksbyjane
"Oh, hi! It's so good to see you."
Jane is from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which is an updated version of Pride and Prejudice done via webcast. Go watch it now, I'll wait.
For those more less familiar with the original canon, I'm going to give you the fastest summary of P&P ever (once more, cribbed from my app. LAZY DAYS, GUYS.)
Lizzie Bennet, second-eldest of the five Bennet daughters, is a forward-thinking young thing whose pushy mom is constantly trying to marry her off. (It's a little more forgivable in the original story, since it's the nineteenth century and girl's gotta eat, amirite?) The charming Mr. Bingley moves to town and promptly falls for the eldest Bennet daughter, the demure and practically perfect Jane, but unfortunately, Bingley's friend Darcy is busy glooming around the place and being a general buzzkill. He and Lizzie take to one another like oil and water, while Lizzie also captures the attention of the charming and suave Mr. Wickham.
Darcy is a TOTAL asshole about Wickham, which only makes Lizzie like Wickham/hate Darcy more. Jane, meanwhile, is all but engaged to Bingley when BAM, he and his sister Caroline, literature's greatest bitch, pack up and jet back to The City. Things look pretty bleak for Jane, particularly in light of how Bingley's changed outlook is ALL DARCY'S FAULT!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!1!!
Meanwhile, Mama Bennet is still trying really hard to marry her girls off, so Lizzie is thrown at the toady Mr. Collins, and she's all "lol no." Mr. Collins ends up marrying her bestie Charlotte, who seems to not have any better prospects and who likes him enough, and everyone's kind of bummed about it. THEN. Darcy shows up and confesses that he's in love with Lizzie, despite acting generally constipated around her and being a dick to her family, and asks for her to marry him. Given the Jane sabotage situation PLUS the Wickham thing, she turns him down, prompting Darcy to send her a letter explaining everything -- like how Wickham's a problem gambler and how he tried to elope with Darcy's bb sister Georgiana. And the Jane thing was borne out of concern for Bingley, given how Mama Bennet won't STFU about how excited she is for her daughter to marry a wealthy dude.
Lizzie realizes she might have been kind of an asshole, but there's more pressing matters afoot -- Lydia, the flighty baby sister of the bunch, ELOPES WITH WICKHAM!!!!! And she is DISGRACED. Darcy, however, steps in with some heavy lifting and bitches Wickham into marrying her and making an honest woman out of her, which prompts Lizzie to realize he's basically awesome and just sucks at social interaction. She marries him, Jane marries Bingley, and everyone has a merry old Regency-style time.
Now. Most adaptations change this around -- it's kind of hard to play off a lot of this stuff in a modern retelling -- but TLBD does something kind of awesome. It, first of all, pares down the Bennet family to the three important sisters (because lol like you even cared about those other two I didn't talk about at all), and gives us a first-person point of view from everyone. The story has been updated to 2012, and is told in a serialized format primarily via webcasts. Lizzie is a communications grad student who's doing a YouTube diary project chronicling her life and those around her. All three girls live at home with the Bennet parents, and Mrs. Bennet is still aggressively trying to marry them off -- though the patriarchal monetary concerns do take a sort of backseat in this version (though it is mentioned that they've been hit pretty hard by the economy, yes.) Jane is a sweet fashion merchandise coordinator, and Lydia is a spacey college student. Bingley is updated to Bing Lee, med student, and Darcy is his sort of hipster-ish, standoffish friend. Mr. Collins makes a business proposition rather than a marriage proposal, which Lizzie rejects and Charlotte gladly takes.
It's shocking how well it all updates, really.
The series started back in the spring, and is currently at episode 70. The characters all have Twitter feeds and Tumblrs that respond to the webcasts and tell the offscreen stories, since each webcast is only about 4 minutes long. We're right after Darcy's letter, so...just about the halfway point.
And okay, who's Jane...other than 'the pretty older sister'?
Excellent question, reader. First of all, Jane is coming from just after just after episode 48, "Snickerdoodles," in which she completely breaks down on camera and realizes she needs a change of pace -- rather than heading to LA like she does in canon, she's following her sister (because yes, Jane is our Lizzie's sister) to Fandom, where she'll be taking over Demon Marcus. Undecided at the moment as to when that name is going to change. It sort of amuses me.
Jane is the oldest of the three Bennet daughters, and by far, the nicest. Almost Disneyesque in her kindness, Jane's the sort of person who treats every single person she meets with a smile and a very real willingness to help; she's an equal-opportunity sweetheart. She's fairly demure (she's been known to tell Lizzie to stop making things dirty), and without fail, she sees the best in people, and in situations -- throughout the series, she's been the one very vocal champion of Darcy.
But I realize "nice" isn't a great character trait; Jane's also very dedicated to her career in fashion, creative in her designs, and an excellent big sister. While Lizzie, a somewhat typical middle child, semi-idolizes her big sister and belittles Lydia, Jane tends to prioritize taking care of her two younger siblings. She's crazy-smart and very perceptive, too, though she doesn't always vocalize what she's thinking -- Jane always looks for the best way to phrase something, and is very conscious of others' feelings. This empathy/sweetness of hers extends to the fact that when she's upset, she does nice things for other people to take her mind off it.
Which brings me to her fatal flaw -- for as sweet and warm as she is, Jane can seem a bit...cool, to the untrained eye. Charlotte memorably notes once that Jane can say, "Hi, it's so good to see you," to the boy she likes, to her friends, and to the postman, and it'll be almost identical in inflection, because she's just that nice to everyone. To the trained Jane Bennet interpreter, there are nuances, but she's so universally sweet to everyone that it can be a little hard to tell where you stand with her. It's sort of like an inverse Derek effect. On top of that, she has a hard time speaking up for herself -- it's not that she's intimidated by others so much as she seems to be constantly worried about other people's feelings, and if she thinks that her own opinion might make someone else feel bad, she won't say it.
Physically, Jane is slim and probably fairly tall (I have no idea what Laura Spencer's height is, but she's a model and in canon looks taller than Lizzie -- probably about 5'9"?), with long red hair and very wide green eyes. Apparently I am COLLECTING SKINNY REDHEADS. She's usually wearing something really cute and vintage-inspired, with charming accessories. This girl was born to be featured on Etsy, is what I'm saying.
I skipped the tl;dr again, sorry.
Name: Jane Bennet
Age: 26 -- older sister of ihaveavideoblog
From: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which you can literally watch right now, stop making excuses.
Taking over: Demon Marcus, where I believe we have openings on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday!
Powers: Bakes awesome cookies, is nice to everyone to the degree that you can't tell if she's FOR REAL (she is), total fashionista, and the best sister ever. Let's close this out with some gifs of Jane being adorable with her two sisters, actually.
And finally, me.
Erin - Aspiring Napper
Omg you guys I have ~two~ newbies now. TWO. I am beside myself.
Let's get the oldies out of the way, bulletpoint-style.
(Also, I'm not apologizing for the amount of gifs in this post, but you should be warned.)
Rory Skywalker, née Gilmore - Alumna//auroryborealis
"I promise, the only way you could be more important to me is if you had a Kit Kat bar growing out of your head."
- 24 years old.
- from Gilmore Girls.
- played by Alexis Bledel
- married to Anakin Skywalker, which makes sense if you take into account that they've been around since day one so there's History there.
- mother of two; Juliet, three and a half, and Christopher, almost seven months. Both children are Force-sensitive, and Rory usually has them with her. Tantrums are epic.
- is a political blogger and somehow paid for it; she's affiliated with a syndicated publisher and followed Obama on the 2012 campaign trail. As such, she knows way more about politics than I do -- I usually have to ask Fry.
- 5'7", unfairly slender thanks to an absurd metabolism, with long straight dark brown hair and a blunt bang cut, and huge blue eyes.
- tends to talk very, very fast and go off on random tangents at the drop of a hat.
- has no powers whatsoever, but is extremely bright and well-educated, and can be bribed with coffee, waffles, or any combination thereof.
Sookie Stackhouse - Alumna//justwantsquiet
“Some might think you suicidal."
"Well, 'some' can stick it up their ass.”
- 19 years old.
- from The Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood, though I am direly behind on canon and I can't bring myself to catch up. Sigh.
- majoring in history with a minor in social work at NYU and living with Bobby Drake, to whom she just got engaged!
- telepathic, though she's much, much better at shielding than she used to be; that being said, you ever want her to pick up on something, please feel free to ask me (and alternately, I might ping you to ask if she can snag something out of your character's narrative or whatnot.)
- part-fairy, siiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. As a result, she can shoot pink lightning bolts/glowy light (it changes) out of her hands when she's pissed off.
- about 5'3" and curvy (canonically she sort of wavers between a size 6-8 in American sizing, because she's all hourglassy), with long wavy blonde hair, brown eyes, and a perpetual tan. She also has a really, really pronounced Louisiana accent, and a gap in her front teeth.
- generally an Everyone's Friend type, but she's very sassy at times. And she's gotten better about swearing! (See gif, though natch that's like, 27 year-old Sookie.)
Daenerys Targaryen - Expat//unburnt_queen
“'Woman?' She chuckled. 'Is that meant to insult me? I would return the slap, if I took you for a man.'”
- 16 years old.
- from A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones
- played by Emilia Clarke
- leaving Fandom for Lucrezia Borgia's version of Rome in a few days here, for plotty reasons. FUN TIMES. She'll be returning to canon this summer, once I see what the show's going to do with her arc since it's easier to adapt from there than the book, as a general rule.
- and yeah, btw, she has three dragons -- Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion. I'm sort of winging it in terms of how fast they're growing since my timeline is sort of screwy, but at this point they're about the size of Shetland ponies -- too small to ride, but big enough that you really don't want to piss them off.
- widow, which is a fact that she'll mention in casual conversation; she will not mention that she also bore a stillborn child the night that her husband died.
- fireproof, which is also something that doesn't tend to come up in conversation much.
- believes herself to be the rightful ruler of Westeros, and styles herself that way (Queen of the Andals and the blah blah) when there's no one around to correct her; otherwise, the titles she really has earned are 'Khaleesi' from her marriage and 'Princess' from her heritage.
- about 5'2" with long, wavy silvery-white hair and green eyes. Has a British Westerosi accent.
- these days, dresses in flowy silk gowns unless she's specified as hanging out in leather pants.
- tends to speak loudly in declarative statements.
Olive Penderghast - Student//dirtiest_skank
"You're being pretty cavalier about this. Aren't you supposed to be eternally in love with him and shit?"
"Yes...I believe so, if I was the Gossip Girl in Sweet Valley of the Traveling Pants."
- 18 years old, and a senior.
- from Easy A
- played by Emma Stone.
- lives with the lovely Karolina Dean and has been dating the suave and debonair Victor Mancha since October.
- routinely calls Sia "Marsie" because she thrives on being obnoxious.
- has a beagle puppy named Ally.
- was expelled from her last school because, after agreeing to pretend she had slept with a classmate to keep him from being bullied, she was slut-shamed and kind of owned it by wearing lingerie to school every day and eventually crashing a pep rally with a sexy rendition of "Knock on Wood." This is all now public knowledge, and no, she's still not over it, Topher.
- as a result of that, has some Issues with sex, boys and especially gossip.
- she's about 5'7" and lanky in build, with red hair, freckles and green eyes. She is also usually not dressed in lingerie, regardless of icon choice, though she still does have her whole modified wardrobe.
Laurie Keller - Townie//ohjellybean
"It's so romantic. Like that movie Inception, when Leo loves his wife so much, but then she gets mad and moves to that weird city where there is like no people and earthquakes all the time. Then he ends up on Snow Mountain and falls in love with Juno."
"Oh, Jellybean...you didn't understand that movie at all, did you?"
"No, but I cried so hard at the end."
- 28 years old.
- from the desperately underrated Cougar Town. (Moving to TBS this January, guys!)
- played by Busy Philipps.
- is the landlady of MHA at the moment, where we have mucho openings!
- very bubbly, very sweet...not especially bright.
- Laurie had a very troubled childhood, which is generally played for laughs, but she was in and out of foster care as a kid and her mom remarried a bunch -- as a result, she's pretty street smart and scrappy, but not...especially book smart. At all.
- huge flirt. HUGE. And to go with that, very sexually free.
- has at least three tattoos that I know about.
- has a ridiculous drinking tolerance.
- about 5'6" but almost always in heels so she clocks in closer to 5'9" most days, with a very healthy figure and no qualms about showing it off. Long, wavy blonde hair, blue eyes, and a fondness for bright colors both in wardrobe and makeup.
- has a slight lisp when she speaks -- it makes her sound even dumber than she actually is, yes.
OKAY WHOO NOW WE'RE ON THE TWO NEWBIES.
If you don't read anything else in this post, please do check out Po's info, as I have another telepath -- kinda.
Prince Po of Lienid - Student//rings_of_grace
“I'll teach you how to defend yourself, how to maim a man. We can use Po as a model.'
'Wonderful,' Po said. 'It's quite boring really, the way you beat me to death with your hands and feet, Katsa. It'll be refreshing to have you come at me with a knife.”
I'm just going to crib most of this from my app, as it's easier.
About Graceling and Kristin Cashore's Seven Kingdoms, which are different from George R. R. Martin's Seven Kingdoms and dude why can't we just have like Eight Kingdoms or Fourteen Kingdoms or something different just once?
Graceling is a young adult series by Kristin Cashore -- that's the title of the first book, and there's then Bitterblue, the sequel, and Fire, a companion. The trilogy is set in the Seven Kingdoms of Nander, Sunder, Monsea, Estill, Wester, Middluns and the island of Lienid. The series is overall mostly realistic fantasy -- lots of kings and queens and lords and ladies and big skirts and arranged marriages, but there's one magical element: Graces.
Graces, for lack of a better word, are basically magic powers. They're roughly as common as, say, the X-gene in Marvel, and a Graced person is marked by having differently-colored eyes -- plus, you know, magic powers. A Grace is a very specific gift -- you might be Graced with cooking, so you make the best bread ever. Or you might be Graced with the ability to find anything, or Graced with archery, or Graced with the ability to predict or control the weather. Gracelings are generally either outcast and mistrusted if they're not useful to the king or queen, or else put right to work as soon as their Grace manifests.
Are we following okay? Sweet.
So, our narrator and heroine, Katsa, is a Graceling from the kingdom of Middluns. (Yes, it's in the middle. Cashore's not great with the naming.) She's a relative of the sadistic, cowardly King Randa, and unfortunately, because of her Grace, she's basically his prisoner. Because you see, the Lady Katsa is Graced with the ability to kill, and as much as she hates it, she's become Randa's assassin. Quietly, though, Katsa's started a rebellion underground, and one night she and a small team go to rescue the Lienid Prince Tealiff, who is being held against his will in a dungeon in Sunder. She encounters a Graced hand-fighter, whose name she eventually learns is Po, and who she leaves alive but unconscious so she can take the aging Tealiff away to Randa's castle to recover.
Katsa runs off on another mission, but when she returns, she finds that the Lienid Prince Po has come to look for his grandfather, and through a series of interesting events that I'll leave vague because of spoilers, she and Po end up on an adventure to restore some semblance of order to the corrupt Seven Kingdoms and rescue Po's cousin, the Princess Bitterblue (which is the SECOND worst name in this series), from the thrall of her father King Leck of Monsea.
And...then there's more book after that, but spoilers, and two other books in the series -- Fire is a sort-of prequel, and Bitterblue covers what happens eight years after the first book. I highly recommend them, and not just because I want an island full of Gracelings with weird Graces. (There's people who are Graced with cooking and who ALWAYS KNOW WHAT WOULD SATISFY YOU MOST. WHY IS THIS NOT MY LIFE?)
Prince Po, who has a lot of Sueish characteristics and I'm sorry for that.
Po, whose name is actually Prince Greening Grandemalion but who the hell is going to call ANYONE THAT EVER, is the seventh son of King Ror of Lienid. He's a Graceling (we'll get to his Grace in the powers section), with one gold eye and one silver eye -- his nickname actually comes from a type of tree with that coloration that grows in this world.
Po is very playful, good-natured, and deceptively carefree. In actuality, he's a very shrewd kind of guy under that facade, but not in a creepy Peter Wiggin kind of way -- he just really notices people and things. And because of that, Po's one of those people who can make friends with a tree stump, because he really wants to get to know you. He's remarkably perceptive (another aspect of his Grace), and very quick-witted -- boy can think fast on his feet. He is also kind of a massive flirt, though maybe less so by Fandom standards. (But by pseudo-medieval standards, he's sort of like sex in lace-up breeches.)
Of course, he's not awesome all the time, every day. Po has a temper, and can be very, very stubborn. He's been known to throw wee tantrums and wander off to sulk, and he'll stick to a point until everyone's basically forgotten what it was about before giving in. But for the most part, he's very good-natured, and is all about everyone getting along. He's also a fairly good strategist, and an excellent hand-fighter.
Physically speaking, Po's tawny in complexion and dark-haired -- Lienid is sort of like the Calormen of this world, in the "it's sort of vaguely ethnic/Middle Eastern/South Asian?" way. He wears ten gold rings on his hands -- one for each member of his family, as well as one distinctive ring that marks him as a Prince of Lienid. He also wears a gold hoop in either ear, and we already talked about his effed up Mary Sue eyes. (I love this series, you guys, but GOD I HATE THE STUPID EYE THING.) It's unlikely anyone'll really see these, at least at first, but he also has a series of intricate tattoos spanning his upper arms -- they're intended to only be seen by the woman he'll marry.
Powers and TRICKERY omg.
Here there be the only spoilers I'm gonna bust out in this thing, because it's actually important that people know this. IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, OMG, READ THIS.
Po is a Graceling, and for about half of the first book, Katsa and the reader are led to believe that his Grace is hand-fighting. He's the only person who can even somewhat match Katsa's abilities, and it's not a secret at all -- all the court in Lienid knows of Prince Po's skills, and in fact word spread even throughout the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. It's been known pretty much since his Grace manifested when he was a small child.
Only, the thing is? Po's not Graced with fighting. He'll be telling people in Fandom that he is, because that's the party line. Remember when I said that kings/queens can basically take Gracelings for their own once they've shown they can be useful, and otherwise, they're an outcast/untrusted people? Well, most of that stems from the more dangerous Graces -- Katsa's ability to kill, or being Graced with compulsion or the ability to change people's minds are the kinds of things that make people wary of Gracelings in the first place.
Po's Grace, actually, is mind-reading, and a super-human understanding of the world around him. At sixteen, it's not fully developed, but by the end of the first novel, Po is able to basically use a sort of psychic echolocation to determine his whereabouts at any given moment, with his eyes closed. He's aware of the shape of everything in the physical world, down to leaves and how they move, and can even find things without ever having seen them because he can sense where they are. How that translates to Fandom is that Po has extraordinarily good reflexes, is a phenomenal fighter (his mom started that story when he was younger to protect him), and is extremely graceful. (Ha.)
Now, on the mind-reading, because it's special too -- Po can only read a character's mind if they are thinking about him specifically. So, when someone is intending to punch him in the face, he can block it because he knows it's coming. Or, as is often more common in Fandom, if someone is thinking, "What an amazingly hot dude, I want to lick that," he'll probably go talk to them with a smile.
As far as gameplay, I will absolutely not mod anything without a player's express permission that I can have him pick up their thoughts. There's always a workaround -- in canon, Graces can kind of cancel each other out and often do. (Po, for instance, is immune to someone Graced with compulsion because he knows their intent. I would imagine he'd also cancel out with another telepathic type.) So I have a signup thread below! Please tell me if Po can't read your character's thoughts, or if you'd rather he didn't, and please also tell me if you want to give me blanket permission to have him do so. If you don't ping into either, I'll probably bother you if our characters ever interact, just to check on that. :)
The important stuff, if you skipped the tl;dr
Name: Prince Greening Grandemalion, but he's actually called Po after a tree, which is the same color as his eyes.
Age, class: 16, junior.
From: Graceling, which you should all read like, yesterday.
Played by: Luke Pasqualino. Sorry, Effy and Lucrezia.
Appearance: Probably right around 6', lanky and muscular, with shaggy dark hair and one silver eye and one gold one. (I'm sorry.) Dresses sort of like medieval Ottoman royalty. Wears a bunch of rings. Has tattoos you won't see unless he really likes you.
Powers: Has a super-human perception of the physical world; can read your mind if you are thinking about him, but can't otherwise. Sign up below to opt out, or opt in blanket-permission-style.
Pie: Apple is best, haters.
This one is easier, omg.
Jane Bennet - Townie//looksbyjane
"Oh, hi! It's so good to see you."
Jane is from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which is an updated version of Pride and Prejudice done via webcast. Go watch it now, I'll wait.
For those more less familiar with the original canon, I'm going to give you the fastest summary of P&P ever (once more, cribbed from my app. LAZY DAYS, GUYS.)
Lizzie Bennet, second-eldest of the five Bennet daughters, is a forward-thinking young thing whose pushy mom is constantly trying to marry her off. (It's a little more forgivable in the original story, since it's the nineteenth century and girl's gotta eat, amirite?) The charming Mr. Bingley moves to town and promptly falls for the eldest Bennet daughter, the demure and practically perfect Jane, but unfortunately, Bingley's friend Darcy is busy glooming around the place and being a general buzzkill. He and Lizzie take to one another like oil and water, while Lizzie also captures the attention of the charming and suave Mr. Wickham.
Darcy is a TOTAL asshole about Wickham, which only makes Lizzie like Wickham/hate Darcy more. Jane, meanwhile, is all but engaged to Bingley when BAM, he and his sister Caroline, literature's greatest bitch, pack up and jet back to The City. Things look pretty bleak for Jane, particularly in light of how Bingley's changed outlook is ALL DARCY'S FAULT!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!1!!
Meanwhile, Mama Bennet is still trying really hard to marry her girls off, so Lizzie is thrown at the toady Mr. Collins, and she's all "lol no." Mr. Collins ends up marrying her bestie Charlotte, who seems to not have any better prospects and who likes him enough, and everyone's kind of bummed about it. THEN. Darcy shows up and confesses that he's in love with Lizzie, despite acting generally constipated around her and being a dick to her family, and asks for her to marry him. Given the Jane sabotage situation PLUS the Wickham thing, she turns him down, prompting Darcy to send her a letter explaining everything -- like how Wickham's a problem gambler and how he tried to elope with Darcy's bb sister Georgiana. And the Jane thing was borne out of concern for Bingley, given how Mama Bennet won't STFU about how excited she is for her daughter to marry a wealthy dude.
Lizzie realizes she might have been kind of an asshole, but there's more pressing matters afoot -- Lydia, the flighty baby sister of the bunch, ELOPES WITH WICKHAM!!!!! And she is DISGRACED. Darcy, however, steps in with some heavy lifting and bitches Wickham into marrying her and making an honest woman out of her, which prompts Lizzie to realize he's basically awesome and just sucks at social interaction. She marries him, Jane marries Bingley, and everyone has a merry old Regency-style time.
Now. Most adaptations change this around -- it's kind of hard to play off a lot of this stuff in a modern retelling -- but TLBD does something kind of awesome. It, first of all, pares down the Bennet family to the three important sisters (because lol like you even cared about those other two I didn't talk about at all), and gives us a first-person point of view from everyone. The story has been updated to 2012, and is told in a serialized format primarily via webcasts. Lizzie is a communications grad student who's doing a YouTube diary project chronicling her life and those around her. All three girls live at home with the Bennet parents, and Mrs. Bennet is still aggressively trying to marry them off -- though the patriarchal monetary concerns do take a sort of backseat in this version (though it is mentioned that they've been hit pretty hard by the economy, yes.) Jane is a sweet fashion merchandise coordinator, and Lydia is a spacey college student. Bingley is updated to Bing Lee, med student, and Darcy is his sort of hipster-ish, standoffish friend. Mr. Collins makes a business proposition rather than a marriage proposal, which Lizzie rejects and Charlotte gladly takes.
It's shocking how well it all updates, really.
The series started back in the spring, and is currently at episode 70. The characters all have Twitter feeds and Tumblrs that respond to the webcasts and tell the offscreen stories, since each webcast is only about 4 minutes long. We're right after Darcy's letter, so...just about the halfway point.
And okay, who's Jane...other than 'the pretty older sister'?
Excellent question, reader. First of all, Jane is coming from just after just after episode 48, "Snickerdoodles," in which she completely breaks down on camera and realizes she needs a change of pace -- rather than heading to LA like she does in canon, she's following her sister (because yes, Jane is our Lizzie's sister) to Fandom, where she'll be taking over Demon Marcus. Undecided at the moment as to when that name is going to change. It sort of amuses me.
Jane is the oldest of the three Bennet daughters, and by far, the nicest. Almost Disneyesque in her kindness, Jane's the sort of person who treats every single person she meets with a smile and a very real willingness to help; she's an equal-opportunity sweetheart. She's fairly demure (she's been known to tell Lizzie to stop making things dirty), and without fail, she sees the best in people, and in situations -- throughout the series, she's been the one very vocal champion of Darcy.
But I realize "nice" isn't a great character trait; Jane's also very dedicated to her career in fashion, creative in her designs, and an excellent big sister. While Lizzie, a somewhat typical middle child, semi-idolizes her big sister and belittles Lydia, Jane tends to prioritize taking care of her two younger siblings. She's crazy-smart and very perceptive, too, though she doesn't always vocalize what she's thinking -- Jane always looks for the best way to phrase something, and is very conscious of others' feelings. This empathy/sweetness of hers extends to the fact that when she's upset, she does nice things for other people to take her mind off it.
Which brings me to her fatal flaw -- for as sweet and warm as she is, Jane can seem a bit...cool, to the untrained eye. Charlotte memorably notes once that Jane can say, "Hi, it's so good to see you," to the boy she likes, to her friends, and to the postman, and it'll be almost identical in inflection, because she's just that nice to everyone. To the trained Jane Bennet interpreter, there are nuances, but she's so universally sweet to everyone that it can be a little hard to tell where you stand with her. It's sort of like an inverse Derek effect. On top of that, she has a hard time speaking up for herself -- it's not that she's intimidated by others so much as she seems to be constantly worried about other people's feelings, and if she thinks that her own opinion might make someone else feel bad, she won't say it.
Physically, Jane is slim and probably fairly tall (I have no idea what Laura Spencer's height is, but she's a model and in canon looks taller than Lizzie -- probably about 5'9"?), with long red hair and very wide green eyes. Apparently I am COLLECTING SKINNY REDHEADS. She's usually wearing something really cute and vintage-inspired, with charming accessories. This girl was born to be featured on Etsy, is what I'm saying.
I skipped the tl;dr again, sorry.
Name: Jane Bennet
Age: 26 -- older sister of ihaveavideoblog
From: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which you can literally watch right now, stop making excuses.
Taking over: Demon Marcus, where I believe we have openings on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday!
Powers: Bakes awesome cookies, is nice to everyone to the degree that you can't tell if she's FOR REAL (she is), total fashionista, and the best sister ever. Let's close this out with some gifs of Jane being adorable with her two sisters, actually.
And finally, me.
Erin - Aspiring Napper
- 25 years old.
- Criminally short. Criminally.
- In the process of moving from North Carolina to Michigan, after having done the reverse last August and then...losing my teaching job. AWESOME TIMES, FRIENDS.Thankfully I have a new job lined up but stress ahoy, anyway.
- So my availabilty is going to be a little weird for awhile, sorry, but I have an iPhone and a new tablet so I am HIGHLY reachable if you ever need to email me or whatever.
- I have the 'Thank You Very Much' song from the Scrooge musical stuck HARD in my head right now. Ugh, get it out.